☕️ Back in the news: Nicky Liow, MYAirline

1. MARKET SUMMARY 📈

2. NUMBERS AT A GLANCE 🔢

USD570 bil (RM2.32 tril) – A sell-off of Microsoft shares at the end of June led to the stock losing that amount in market value (bigger than Malaysia’s GDP) and pushed the stock to its lowest closing price since 2023. This also put the stock down 17% for the month, marking its worst monthly showing since Dec 2000. The sell-off was attributed to increasingly cautious investors with broad apprehension about Microsoft spending aggressively to build out AI infrastructure and release its own AI products, due to concerns that the heavy spending on AI infrastructure is not generating sufficient returns.

8.8 mil – That’s how many of MrBeast’s Feastables chocolate bars were sold in the 52-week period ended Mar 2026. This is less growth than expected, considering sales grew from 7.6 mil units sold in 2024 to 8.6 mil sold in 2025. Feastables was launched in 2022 by Beast Industries, founded by YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast. The candy bar brand saw a net revenue of USD215 mil (RM879.24 mil) in 2024, more than double that of 2023, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025 to USD375 mil.

USD30,000 (RM122,685) – The personal working planner of Colonel Harland Sanders, said to contain an unlabelled recipe for 11 herbs and spices, sold for that much at a recent auction of KFC memorabilia, organised by the Menish Group. This recipe has prompted speculation in the past that it is the secret recipe for KFC, though the fast-food brand said the ingredients did not align with its secret recipe and could instead be for stuffing. The auction of memorabilia is also being held at the same time as a sealed-bid auction of Blackwood Hall, the home of Colonel Sanders and his wife, Claudia. The property also includes Claudia Sanders Dinner House, the business started by the couple after Colonel Sanders sold KFC, which remains operational to this day.
View the property auction here, the memorabilia auction here, and the planner here.

3. IN MALAYSIA 🇲🇾

Crime and courts
Nicky Liow gets DNAA in RM36 mil case: Businessman Nicky Liow received a discharge not amounting to an acquittal (DNAA) on 26 money laundering charges involving more than RM36 mil after settling RM400,000 in unpaid taxes. His lawyer said the DNAA was granted in 2022 after the Attorney-General’s Chambers withdrew the prosecution. The charges can still be revived if new evidence or circumstances emerge.

Liow, the founder of Winner Dynasty Group, was previously tracked by police over an alleged Macau scam syndicate after 68 suspected members were arrested in Mar 2021. He was charged in absentia with being a member of an organised crime group before surrendering on Apr 11, 2022. The Pahang palace had also stripped him of an award carrying the title of Datuk Seri.

Pay tax, walk free. That was just too easy.

MYAirline founder ordered to repay RM67.6mil: The KL High Court ordered MYAirline co-founder Goh Hwan Hua and entities linked to him to repay RM67.6 mil to 206 investors. The court ruled that their investment operation was an illegal deposit-taking and Ponzi-style scheme. Judgment in default was granted on Jul 16 after the defendants failed to appear or file a defence. The court found that products marketed as shariah-compliant did not meet the requirements and that investors had been misled. Goh and the other defendants must repay the full amount with interest and disclose details of their bank accounts and financial dealings. The investors, who were promised guaranteed monthly returns, were also awarded RM80,000 in costs.

Six immigration officers held over MyIMMs hack: Six immigration officers were among 12 people arrested on Jul 28 over the alleged hacking of the Malaysian Immigration System. The syndicate is suspected of unlawfully approving 1,306 Temporary Employment Visit Passes without collecting the required levies, causing an estimated RM2.4 mil in government losses. Those detained included two officers from the Immigration Department’s Information Technology Division, two company directors, three foreign nationals and a police officer. The MACC said the operation followed investigations conducted across the Klang Valley and Penang since May 2026.

Refugee debate
Malaysia may review UNHCR’s presence: Malaysia may reconsider allowing the United Nations refugee agency to maintain an office in the country unless cooperation over refugee management improves. Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said stricter screening was needed before UNHCR cards were issued, with the process jointly handled by the agency and Malaysian authorities. He claimed some refugees could apply online from their home countries and collect their cards after arriving in Malaysia, making the country a “magnet for refugees”. Mohamad said a formal agreement was needed to clearly define UNHCR’s powers, responsibilities and operating procedures. His comments followed the detention of more than 100 Rohingya asylum seekers who gathered outside the agency’s KL office after being evicted from their homes in Penang. Police said those detained had valid UNHCR documents and would be moved to temporary accommodation while their records were checked.

Closing the UNHCR office may not solve the issue: Former UNHCR head of education Wan Mimi Zarina Wan Azmin said closing the agency’s office would not make the refugees already living in Malaysia disappear. She said UNHCR currently handles registration, documentation and staffing using international funding because Malaysia does not have its own refugee management system. Creating a national framework could cost tens of millions of ringgit each year (who wants kontrak?).

Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention but hosts about 215,600 refugees and asylum seekers. Around 193,824 are from Myanmar, including 126,144 Rohingya, while 21,776 come from more than 50 other countries. Children account for 64,680 of the total.

Vantage weighs USD2 bil Malaysia data centre sale
Vantage Data Centers is considering selling its Malaysian assets in a deal that could be worth more than USD2 bil (RM8.18 bil), according to Bloomberg. The DigitalBridge-backed company is reportedly working with a financial adviser, although discussions are still ongoing and it may decide to keep the assets. Vantage owns the 31MW KUL1 data centre campus in Cyberjaya and is building another facility there with 436MW of planned capacity. It is also developing three data centres in Johor with a combined capacity of more than 300MW. Neither Vantage nor DigitalBridge has commented on the possible sale. DigitalBridge is currently being acquired by SoftBank Group Corp for about USD3 bil.

4. AROUND THE WORLD 🌎

Geopolitics
Oman proposes voluntary fees to Iran
Oman might have had it. Backed by Gulf states, it presented Iran with a plan to manage the Strait of Hormuz. Oman proposed to collect voluntary fees alongside Iran for using the strait based on the one in place in Strait of Malacca. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore ask ships to pay voluntary fees to fund navigation, environmental protection and search-and-rescue operations. This way, Iran would not have total control of the strait.

Iran has rejected Oman’s proposal for an equal division of transit routes between them and instead proposed that Iran would manage shipping through its side of the strait, while Oman would manage part but not all of the opposite lane. So, Iran wants to control more than 50% of the strait. Oman, playing the art of the deal, proposes that there should be three shipping lanes - one through Iran, an international one, and one through Oman waters. The US is throwing a wet blanket over this by insisting that all ships should not pay any fees for passing an international shipping lane. Iran threw another one, by saying it had ‘no plans to negotiate with the US’.

Houthis want to emulate Iran in Red Sea
We all have role models. Yemen’s government said that the Houthis want to replicate Iran’s strategy by controlling shipping flows in the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait (view map here). In 2014, the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa and then-President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. What followed was a seven-year war waged by an Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. In 2022, the Houthis signed a truce but remained in power in the capital and other parts of Yemen. An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died between 2015 and 2022. Here is a map that shows which areas the Houthis control and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean. About 30% of the world’s container traffic goes through the Red Sea, which makes up 12 to 15% of global trade. Shipping has already declined, with only 11 commodity ships passing through on Sunday. Saudi Arabia has since launched strikes against Yemen’s key port city of Hodeidah, which is held by the Houthis.

Protesters heckle Netanyahu in Washington DC
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally understands how a comedian feels. Protesters stormed the Washington DC hotel that he was in and heckled him. They were screaming, ‘Bibi, bibi, you can’t hide, you are committing genocide.’ It kinda slaps, not gonna lie. Security officers were seen preventing the protestors from approaching Netanyahu as they chanted repeatedly. He is in town to have talks with Trump about reaffirming their shared goals of disarming Iran’s nuclear weapons. Netanyahu said, ‘When I say excellent, it’s not just lip service. It was a conversation of full partnership, of mutual support, with an understanding of the shared goal to ensure that Iran will not have nuclear weapons, and also other goals.’
Here is the footage of the protestors.

Trump bans Chinese humanoid robots
The rivalry intensifies, and the Thucydides trap tightens. Trump’s administration is now banning new foreign-made humanoid robot imports, which include humanoid, four-legged machines. Most of them are made in China now, with the likes of Unitree, UBTech and AgiBot being major producers. It also bans power inverters that are used in solar panels and data centres. It cites that they pose risks to the economy and are looking ‘to secure America’s critical supply chains’. Foreign-made inverters could be turned off, steal data, and facilitate remote access and surveillance by ‘foreign government actors, or be exploited through cyberattacks’.

Robots can also allow ‘malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots’. Meanwhile, the Chinese are not having this, as they have ‘long opposed the US’ politicising of trade issues and sanctions’. Recall that the Chinese said that they would take ‘all necessary measures’ if the US moves to sanction Chinese AI companies over using US AI models to train their models.
Learn: What is the Thucydides trap and why did Xi Jinping mention it in his meeting with Donald Trump?

AI Headaches
OpenAI agent hacking again
After one of its AI agents went ‘rogue’ and hacked Hugging Face, OpenAI’s AI agent apparently also hacked a customer at a second technology firm. Hugging Face did not say who it was, but Reuters reported that it was New York-based Modal Labs. Akshat Bubna, CTO of Modal, said the agent exploited vulnerable code written by a customer on their platform. OpenAI did not provide many details about this and only said that the agent had broken into four accounts at four separate services. In the Hugging Face case, it said that the agent used stolen login details and found an unknown security flaw to access Hugging Face’s servers. What a world we live in, with an AI agent creating agent and spy thriller content for us. The only problem is that it’s real.

557% profit growth? SK Hynix learns the hard lesson
If a company’s operating profit jumped by more than 5 times, investors would be over the moon. Not SK Hynix’s investors. The share price has fallen off a cliff, declining by as much as 20%, before closing 10% lower after it reported record Q2 earnings. Apparently, it ‘fell short of analysts’ forecasts’. Operating profit came in at a record KRW60.5 tril (RM170 bil) but analysts expected KRW 64 tril. It seems like a classic growth story. There is strong demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM due to AI data centres. SK Hynix is the market leader in HBM with a 58% share, while it is the second-largest DRAM supplier with a 29% market share. But this wasn’t good enough.

Investors expected and wanted more from SK Hynix. This 10% decline came with Samsung also declining by 5%, and both companies dragged the South Korean market, KOSPI, down by 6%. Despite strong growth, investors are growing more worried about ‘AI-driven valuations’ as they are unsure whether huge AI capital expenditure investments by big tech companies would yield results. The South Korean authorities are now coming together for an emergency meeting to review the market, after it has more than tripled from the start of 2025 to its peak in June, before declining by 40% now. These market movements are bad for investors who have heart problems.

South Korean authorities are sorry over single-stock leveraged ETFs
Who in their right mind would ever think that leverage will always be net beneficial to the larger population? Continuing on the South Korean markets, the top policymakers have said they are sorry for introducing single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The ETFs have been blamed for making the stock market downturn much worse. But it’s hard to believe that the regulators said they ‘introduced the product without careful consideration’ when the product itself is a big gamble and a bet for investors to borrow money to speculate on a single stock.

Single-stock leveraged ETFs became more popular as the market for index leveraged ETFs became increasingly crowded. Investors wanted to shift to single-name growth stories where risks are higher (so are the returns) for the short-term. 25% of funds launched as of Sept 2025 were leveraged ETFs, with the majority of them being single-stock ETFs. When you combine leverage and single-stock in the same sentence, we all know these ‘traders’ and ‘investors’ are the casino enjoyers. Learn: What are single-stock ETFs.

5. FOR YOUR EYES 📺

1. This IS NOT AI-generated. This is by Unitree, one of China’s Six Little Dragons (DeepSeek is one of them too). If you want to order one, visit here.

2. ❌ Robots carrying guns ✅ Robots carrying vacuum cleaners. For USD30 (RM122.68), Tau Robotics can offer robots to clean your house. Watch the other videos in thread for more robo-cleaning action. Not fully autonomous - jointly controlled by human and AI.

3. Just for laughs. If this set of namecards does exist, it’s going to be worth more than any Pokémon cards.